Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, “Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written.�  Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, “We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life.�  Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the end: Lacan “evacuated� from the rue d’Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That “Revolution� means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager—which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic—not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.  Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
Translated with Notes by Bruce Fink

A startling psycholinguistic exploration of the boundaries of love and knowledge.

Often controversial, always inspired, Jacques Lacan here weighs theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. He leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Long anticipated by English-speaking readers, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love and desire.

Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence. In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in its oral, anal, scopic and vociferated guises, alongside Lacan’s exploration of the question of the 'analyst's desire'. Arriving at these concepts from a multitude of angles, Lacan leads his audience with great care through a range of recurring themes such as anxiety between jouissance and desire, counter-transference and interpretation, and the fantasy and its frame. This important volume, which forms Book X of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, will be of great interest to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, from literature and critical theory to sociology, psychology and gender studies.

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.' Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis. Freud's famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber is central to Lacan's analysis. In demonstrating the many ways that the psychotic is `inhabited, possessed by language', Lacan draws upon Schreber's own account of his psychosis and upon Freud's notes on this 'case of paranoia'. The analysis of language is both fascinating and enlightening.

Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: "Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language". Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis. Freud's famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber is central to Lacan's analysis. In demonstrating the many ways that the psychotic is "inhabited, possessed by language", Lacan draws upon Schreber's own account of his psychosis and upon Freud's notes on this "case of paranoia". He offers an analysis of language that is both fascinating and enlightening.

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less speci

Ecrits is Lacan's most important work, bringing together twenty-seven articles and lectures originally published between 1936 and 1966. This is the essential source for anyone who seeks to understand this seminal thinker and his influence on contemporary thought and culture.

This new translation of Jacques Lacan's deliberation on psychoanalysis and contemporary social order offers welcome, readable access to the brilliant author's seminal thinking on Freud, Marx, and Hegel; patterns of social and sexual behavior; and the nature and function of science and knowledge in the contemporary world.

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural and media studies. He gained his reputation as a lecturer, disseminating his ideas to audiences that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Luce Irigaray amongst other hugely influential names. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a transcript of his most important lecture series. Including influential readings of Sophocles' Antigone and Elizabethan courtly love poetry in relation to female sexuality, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis remains a powerful and controversial work that is still argued over today by the likes of Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek.

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less specialist audience than ever before, amongst whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted "to introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based", namely the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive. In re-defining these four concepts he explores the question that, as he puts it, moves from "Is psycho-analysis a science?" to "What is a science that includes psycho-analysis?"

A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural and media studies. He gained his reputation as a lecturer, disseminating his ideas to audiences that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Luce Irigaray amongst other hugely influential names. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a transcript of his most important lecture series. Including influential readings of Sophocles' Antigone and Elizabethan courtly love poetry in relation to female sexuality, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis remains a powerful and controversial work that is still argued over today by the likes of Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek.

Genius and charismatic leader of a psychoanalytic movement that in the 1950s and 1960s provided a focal point for the French intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan attracted a cult following. Ecrits is his most important work, bringing together twenty-seven articles and lectures originally published between 1936 and 1966. Following its first publication in 1966, the book gained Lacan international attention and exercised a powerful influence on contemporary intellectual life. To this day, Lacan's radical, brilliant and complex ideas continue to be highly influential in everything from film theory to art history and literary criticism. Ecrits is the essential source for anyone who seeks to understand this seminal thinker and his influence on contemporary thought and culture.

For a long time, the term 'ideology' was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory, and to political practice. Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Zizek's study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukacs and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret--that is, to read--the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals. Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits. Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example. What people have latched onto about Lacan's work--his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father--was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire's course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines. This Seminar predicted "the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion." We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst after Freud.

This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.

Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work has had a tremendous influence on contemporary discourse. Lacan lies at the epicenter of contemporary discourses about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law and enjoyment. Yet his seemingly impenetrable writing style has kept many a reader from venturing beyond page one. This new translation of selected writings from his most famous work offers welcome access to nine of his most significant contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique. Ranging from "The Mirror Stage" to "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," and including "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" and other papers on various aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice, this selection spans some thirty years of Lacan's inimitable intellectual career.

"I am the product of priests", Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was wonderfully able to speak to Catholics and to bring them around to psychoanalysis. Jesuits flocked to his school. Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science. - Jacques-Alain Miller

Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions and "the attraction of transgression," Lacan illuminates Freud's psychoanalytic work and its continued influence. Lacan explores the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy (a reading of Sophocle's Antigone), and the tragic dimension of analytic experience. His exploration leads us to startling insights on "the consequence of man's relationship to desire" and the conflicting judgments of ethics and analysis.

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
Translated with notes by John Forrester

"The Seminar: Books I and II have a special place because of their value as an introduction to Lacan. . . . [They] are a sure path of entry into Lacan's critique of ego psychology. . . . Lacan's work underscores that part of Freud's message that is most revlutionary for our time. The individual is 'decentered'. There is no autonomous self. What sex was to the Victorians, the question of free will is to our new Fin-de-Siecle." —Sherry Turkle, London Review of Books

"A rare opportunity to experience Lacan as a teacher. . . . THe publication of these two early seminars . . . may allow Lacan's work to do what it does most remarkably: she light on, and expend, the theoretical implications of psychoanalysis, but also to train a new generation of psychoanalysts by asking again: what exactly do we do when we do psychoanalysis?" —Lisa Kennedy, Voice Literary Supplement

Jacques Lacan is arguably the most controversial psychoanalyst of our time. Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the école freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980.

The question of feminine sexuality has divded the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and priviledge but as the terms through which any such priviledge is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category "woman" as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined.

"I am the product of priests", Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was wonderfully able to speak to Catholics and to bring them around to psychoanalysis. Jesuits flocked to his school. Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science. - Jacques-Alain Miller